Category: Etymology

Q: I’ve been bothered by a usage in the MTA’s automated subway announcement at certain stations (e.g., 14th St.-Union Square): “please be careful of the gap.” One can be plain careful and one can be careful to do or not to do something. But can one be careful of something? Mindful, yes (and that’s presumably what the MTA meant).

A: In some New York City train stations, there’s a gap between the car and the edge of the platform—a nasty hazard for the unwary. The same is true in London.

In New York, subway riders are told to “be careful of the gap.” But in London, riders of the underground are told to “mind the gap.”

In both cities it’s good advice, given in good English.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority could have used the word “mindful” instead, but there’s nothing wrong in its telling people to “please be careful of the gap.”

The phrase “be careful” doesn’t have to be followed by the preposition “to” plus an infinitive, as in these examples: “be careful to cross at the light” … “be careful not to fall” … “be careful to ask permission first.”

It can be followed by other prepositions: “be careful of the eggs” … “be careful around the baby” … “be careful with knives.” This is how “be careful” is used in that subway announcement.

“Be careful” can also be followed by “that” (“be careful that no errors creep in”). And, as you know, the adjective “careful” can be followed by a noun (“a careful surgeon”).

Like most English words, “careful” has undergone some changes over the centuries. When first recorded, in Old English, it had meanings that are no longer used today.

For one thing, it meant “full of grief; mournful, sorrowful,” the Oxford English Dictionary says. For another, “careful” meant “full of care, trouble, anxiety, or concern.”

So in the very distant past, “careful cries” were cries of grief or sorrow; a “careful widow” was a mourning one; a “careful brow” was a troubled brow. In those days, people didn’t tell each other to “be careful.”

Today they do, because “careful” roughly means attentive, painstaking, watchful, cautious, exercising or taking care, and so on.

Though a couple of isolated uses were recorded in the 11th century, examples of the newer meanings didn’t appear in significant numbers until the 16th century.

In its newer incarnations, “careful” is often followed by a preposition. The OED says the word can mean “full of care or concern for, attentive to the interests of, taking good care of,” and so on (the preposition that follow are shown in italics).

Here’s an example of a “careful of,” cited by the OED: “Be careful of the horses, Sam … don’t ride them too fast” (from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852).

And as we’ve said, “careful” can also be followed by “that” as well as by infinitive phrases. Here are examples of each:

“Be careful that they are neither thrown about nor changed” (from Hoyle’s Games Improved, 1820).

“Both males and females are careful to ornament their persons with paint” (from William Macgillivray’s The Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt, 1836).

So “careful of” is a well established English usage. The MTA uses the phrase not only in its recorded announcements but also on its website.

On a page entitled “How to Ride the Subway,” the transportation agency says, “Be careful of the gap between the platform and the train.”

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Q: My mother tells me that as a girl she once asked the grocer for a lub of butter, which brings me to my question: why don’t the abbreviations “lb.” and “oz.” look more like the words they stand for, “pound” and “ounce”?

A: Those two abbreviations are short for foreign terms, which is why they bear so little resemblance to their English counterparts.

Our abbreviation “lb.” (plural “lbs.”) is from the Latin libra, which means “pound.” It came into use in English in the 14th century.

And “oz.” (both singular and plural) is from an obsolete Italian word for “ounce,” onza. (The modern Italian term is oncia.) English writers borrowed the “oz.” abbreviation from the Italians in the 15th century.

Two other frequently seen abbreviations, “i.e.” and “e.g.,” are short for the Latin phrases id est (which means “that is”) and exempli gratia (“for example”).

These abbreviations, which came into use in English in the 17th century, are sometimes used incorrectly. Here’s how Pat explains them in her grammar and usage guide Woe Is I (revised 3rd ed.):

“Go ahead. Be pretentious in your writing and toss in an occasional e.g. or i.e. But don’t mix them up. Clumsy inaccuracy can spoil that air of authority you’re shooting for. E.g. is short for a Latin term, exempli gratia, that means ‘for example.’ Kirk and Spock had much in common, e.g., their interest in astronomy and their concern for the ship and its crew. The more specific term i.e., short for the Latin id est, means ‘that is.’ But they had one obvious difference, i.e., their ears. Both e.g. and i.e. must have commas before and after (unless, of course, they’re preceded by a dash or a parenthesis).”

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Q: We say “northeast” and “southwest” in giving directions, not “eastnorth” or “westsouth.” Why do we mention the up or down word first and the left or right word second?

A: Actually people did at one time, mainly in the days before the compass, use such terms as “eastnorth” and “westsouth.”

In fact, Old English versions of “eastnorth” and “westsouth” coexisted with early versions of “northeast” and “southwest,” though the pairs apparently had different meanings. 

But let’s begin with the 16 main compass points in the modern directional system.

In English, the  four principal compass points are north, south, east, and west. The four intermediate points are “northeast,” “southeast,” “southwest,” and “northwest.”

Each of those eight divisions is further divided—“north-northeast,” “east-northeast,” and so on—and in some kinds of navigation the divisions are even smaller.

But it’s the intermediate directions we’re concerned with here—“northeast,” “southwest,” etc. In these compound words, “north” and “south” always come first, while “east” and “west” are subsidiary.

Why is this? There are several reasons.

First of all, speakers of Old English probably didn’t make a conscious decision in favor of using “northeast” instead of “eastnorth” and so on. They were likely influenced by similar compound words in other old Germanic languages.

“Northeast,” which we’ll use as our example, is northostan in Old Saxon, northost in Old Dutch, northastera in Old Frisian, and nordostan in Old High German. It’s noordoost in modern Dutch; noroaustur in Icelandic; and nordost in German, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish.

And in the Romance languages, it’s northest in Old French; nordest in modern French and Italian; and nordeste in Spanish and Portuguese.

But there’s a more elemental reason why “north” and “south” now come first in such compounds, while “east” and “west” come second.

North has always had a special significance in navigation. In the days before compasses, when mariners relied on the stars to get their bearings, they used the North Star (Polaris) as a reference.

More to the point (if you’ll pardon the expression), the needle of a compass points to the magnetic north, with the other directions derived from that bearing.

And maps commonly include a legend or device pointing to the geographic north; the other directions are assumed from that.

Those are reasons enough for north and south (the “up” and “down” directions, as you call them) to take precedence over east and west (the “right” and “left.”) But there’s one more.

The modern English system of directional points—with four principal directions bisected by “northeast,” “southeast,” “southwest,” and “northwest”—was known to be in use by the early 12th century, which is about when Europeans began using compasses.

This system, says the OED, “superseded an older twelve-point system (with its origin in the twelve winds of antiquity) in which each quadrant was subdivided by two intermediate points at 30° intervals.”

Here again, the OED says, the subdivisions were “denominated by compounds: north-east, east-north; east-south, south-east; south-west, west-south; west-north, north-west.”

Do you find this confusing? The ancient mariners probably did too. As the OED comments, “it is unclear with what degree of exactitude these terms were applied, as the surviving texts evince much confusion.”

Obviously, it was much clearer to divide each quadrant by only one intermediate point (“northeast,” for instance), and then to put one further subdivision on each side of that one (creating “north-northeast” and “east-northeast”).

As we’ve always said, the point of using good, clear English is to communicate. And when words are designed to tell you where you are, they shouldn’t be confusing.

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Q: I thought you might like this (at best) archaic usage in a recent headline on Gizmodo: “This Airplane’s Landing / Was So Violent That It / Bended Its Fuselage.” To its credit, the electronic-gadgets blog has since changed it to “bent.”

A: The word “bended” was the original Old English past participle of the verb “bend,” but it was replaced by “bent” (and briefly “bend”) in Middle English.

The Oxford English Dictionary says “bended” is now “semi-archaic” and used adjectivally, “chiefly in on bended knees, etc.”

Here’s an adjectival usage from Shakespeare’s Henry V (circa 1599): “His bruised Helmet, and his bended Sword.”

The writer of the original Gizmodo headline used “bended” as the past tense of “bend,” not as a past participle.

Although “bended” has occasionally been used as a past tense, primarily in the 16th and 17th centuries, standard dictionaries now list only “bent” as the past tense.

We’re glad you brought that headline to our attention, though, because “bend” is an interesting word. It’s related to “band,” “bind,” “bond,” and “bundle.”

In Old English, according to John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins, the verb bendan meant to tie up as well as to curve.

The two meanings apparently developed because of the use of bendan in archery. The tying-up sense was used in reference to bow strings. The bending sense evolved from the curving of the bow.

We’ll end with an excerpt from the Robin Hood ballads (circa 1500), with Robin and his Merry Men, bows bent, ready for battle:

Sone there were good bowes ibent,
Mo than seven score,
Hedge ne dyche spared they none,
That was them before.

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Q: Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d expect the abbreviation for “North” to be “N” on highway exit signs. Here on Long Island (and elsewhere in New York), it’s always “No” (as in “No Conduit Ave” or “No Ocean Avenue”). Would a visitor dare take “No Exit” when it might lead nowhere? I jest, but those abbreviations bug me.

A: We agree that the abbreviation “No” on a street sign can be confusing to a stranger, especially one from out of state.

As it happens, the New York State Department of Transportation is on your side, and when those signs wear out and get replaced, they won’t look the same.

We’ll get back to the signs that bug you and (with the help of a state official) explain this “No” business. But first, a little etymology (this is a language site, after all).

The earliest abbreviation that was used for “north” was the initial “N” (usually capitalized and often followed by a period), a convention that originated in naval terminology.

The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded example of the abbreviation is from a dispatch sent by Sir Edward Howard, Lord Admiral of the British fleet, to King Henry VIII in 1513: “The Monday last, the wynd roosse soon to N.N.E.”

The single letter “N” has been used to mean “north” ever since. And while a two-letter version, “No.,” is sometimes used for the purpose, the OED has no citations for it.

In fact, in legal language the use of “No.” to mean “north” is a no-no.

The precedent legal dictionaries cite for this is a 19th-century court case (Burr v Broadway Ins. Co., 16 NY 267, 271) that has to do with a building described inaccurately in a fire-insurance policy.

According to the Cyclopedia of Law and Procedure (1908), the findings in that trial established the legal use of the initials “E, N, S, and W for east, north, south, and west, respectively.”

And “No.,” say the editors, “was held not to be an abbreviation of ‘north.’” Instead, they write, “No.” is “used as an abbreviation of the word ‘number.’”

Other law dictionaries say the same thing. A 1969 edition of Ballentine’s Law Dictionary defines “no.” as “an abbreviation of number” and says it’s “improper as an abbreviation of ‘north.’ ” The proper abbreviation of “north,” it says, is “n.”

And Black’s Law Dictionary defines the initial “N” this way: “In English, a common and familiar abbreviation for the word ‘north,’ as used in maps, charts, conveyances, etc.”

But when you don’t expect to be sued, is it OK to write “No.” for north? It’s fine, according to standard dictionaries.

Both Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) and The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) say that “north” can be abbreviated with one letter or two.

M-W gives the two-letter abbreviation lowercased and without a period (“no”), but American Heritage uses the period and says the abbreviation can be capitalized or lowercased (“no.” or “No.”), so sign-makers can justify any of those three options.

We haven’t been able to tell just when the abbreviation “No.” for “north” became acceptable in standard dictionaries (legal terminology aside). But we can make a rough guess.

The two-letter abbreviation doesn’t appear in our 1956 copy of Webster’s New International Dictionary (the unabridged 2nd ed.). So it seems to have become acceptable to the folks at Merriam-Webster’s sometime within the last 50 years or so.

Regardless of what current dictionaries say, we don’t like the two-letter abbreviation. When seen at a glance or glimpsed through a windshield, it looks like the adverb “no” (the opposite of “yes”). So a sign like “No Beach St.” seems to say you can’t get to the beach from there.

Would a stranger really be confused? Probably not, but who knows?

We think a simple “N” would be better. And as it happens, federal and state (and most municipal) authorities think so too. The New York signs that still say “No” for north just haven’t been replaced in a while.

Jennifer Post, an information officer with the New York transportation agency, says the state now uses the same abbreviations (“N,” “S,” “E,” and “W”) as those recommended by the federal government in its National Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

She recently emailed us to explain why those “NO” exit signs showed up in New York and when we’ll see the last of them:

 “Many of the signs with abbreviations such as NO and SO may have complied with the standard of the time when they were originally installed. But as signs are replaced across the state the abbreviations are being simplified to ‘N’ and ‘S’ to comply” with the new standards.

“The most cost-effective time to make sure a sign meets current standards is when it needs to be replaced.”

Many local governments do the same, she added.

New York City, for example, has a similar policy. Street signs in the city’s five boroughs use the abbreviations “N,” “S,” “E,” and “W,” according to “Standard Highway Specifications” (Vol. II), published by the City of New York Department of Transportation.

That’s good news. Big-city driving is enough of a hassle as it is.

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Q: In 2008, you advised a DJ that it’s OK to use “premises” to describe a singular location, but you didn’t go so far as to say “premise” would be incorrect. This use of the singular “premise” REALLY GRATES on my ears.

A: In that blog posting, we didn’t tell the DJ in so many words that “on premise” is incorrect. But it is, as he probably gathered, because we said the noun is always plural—“premises”—when it means a location or place of business.

In this sense, “premises” is often used with a singular verb, so one can properly write either “premises is” or “premises are.”

In explaining the noun’s history, we said the singular form, “premise,” entered English in the late 1300s as a term in logic meaning a statement or proposition.

In the following century, the plural form “premises” became a term in legal usage. Among other things, it was shorthand for land or buildings mentioned earlier in a deed or other legal document.

As a result of its use in legal terminology, the Oxford English Dictionary says, people in the early 1600s began using “premises” (always in the plural) to mean “a house or building together with its grounds, outhouses, etc., esp. a building or part of a building that houses a business.”

To this day, the word should be plural in this sense, according to the OED as well as standard dictionaries. So “premises” is the word businesses should use when they mean their location or site, and that brings us to another point.

We suspect that the familiar phrase “on site” has led to the use of “on premises” (sometimes written even more elliptically as “on premise”).

But “premises” is generally used with “the,” as in “All baking is done on the premises.” (A Google search found 127 million hits for “on the premises” versus 15.4 million for “on premises.”)

Is it OK to drop the article? Well, Pat finds “on premises” off-putting, but Stewart isn’t put off by it.

This tendency to drop articles isn’t unusual in broadcasting, but Pat wishes it would go away.

In a previous posting , she mentioned examples like “from bullpen” (as in “The manager is bringing Rivera in from bullpen”), or “on scene” (as in “This is Anderson, reporting on scene”), or “in studio” (“Now back to Brian in studio”).

Readers of our blog have written to comment about each of these usages.

We suppose it’s possible that broadcasters adopted this habit from British usage (as they adopted the now ubiquitous “gone missing”).

When we hear Americans dropping their articles, we’re reminded of a humorous piece in the L.A. Times. The writer walked into a restaurant and spotted a friend, who asked her to join him “at table.” The writer replied, “Let’s just sit at booth.”

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Q: Is it OK to say something is “more irrelevant” or do you have to say it’s “less relevant”? The second is more common, but I was wondering if the first is incorrect.

A: Both phrases are acceptable, but they have different shades of meaning.

A careful writer would use “less relevant” when comparing two relevant things, and “more irrelevant” when comparing two irrelevant things.

These hypothetical sentences will illustrate what we mean:

“The salesman insisted that price was less relevant than quality” (quality was relevant, but price less so).

“She considers numerology more irrelevant than astrology” (astrology is irrelevant to her, and numerology even more so).

The word “relevant” has had an interesting history, in case you’d like to know more.

It ultimately comes from the classical Latin verb relevare (to raise, lighten, or lessen), the same word that gave us “relieve” and “relief.”

In medieval Latin, the adjective relevantum or relevans came to mean legitimate, valid, or pertinent, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.

This is the sense of “relevant” that entered English in the early 1500s, originally as a Scottish legal term.

As John Ayto explains in his Dictionary of Word Origins, “The modern English sense ‘appropriate’ probably developed from a medieval application of relevare to ‘take up,’ hence ‘take possession of property,’ which led to relevant being used as a legal term for ‘connected with.’”

“Relevant,” the OED says, was first recorded in Scottish law in 1516 to mean “legally sufficient, adequate, or pertinent.”

Soon afterward, another sense developed: “bearing on or connected with the matter in hand,” but the OED says that use of “relevant” was “relatively rare before 1800.”

The contemporary meaning—appropriate or applicable in the circumstances, or having relevance—didn’t become common until the 1950s, the OED says.

We’re old enough to remember that for a while in the late 1960s and early ’70s, the word was so widely overused that it became almost trite.

Here’s an OED citation from a 1969 issue of Harper’s Magazine: “Either we can commit ourselves to changing the institutions of our society that need to be changed, to make them—to use a term which I hate—‘relevant’ … or we can sit back and try to defend them.”

As for “irrelevant,” it first showed up in writing in the late 18th century, and was mostly used to describe legal depositions, arguments, and proceedings.

One of the OED’s few citations for the adjective used in a general sense is from the essayist Charles Lamb, who wrote in 1823, “A Poor Relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature.”

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Q: I’m at a loss. Can you help clarify the difference between “guarantee” and “guaranty”?

A: Some sticklers insist on a difference in meaning, but we disagree. In contemporary English, “guarantee” and “guaranty” are nearly always interchangeable as nouns and verbs.

They differ in that “guarantee” is far more popular, and “guaranty” is used in the proper names of some financial institutions. (There’s a difference in pronunciation, too: “guarantee” is stressed on the last syllable, “guaranty” on the first.)

We’ll get to the sticklers later, but first let’s look at what Henry Fowler, the language maven’s language maven, has to say about this in the 1926 first edition of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

“Fears of choosing the wrong one of these two are natural, but needless,” Fowler writes. “As things now are, -ee is never wrong where either is possible.”

Although “guaranty” may be preferred in some legal uses, he adds, it’s OK to use “guarantee” for these senses too.

“Those who wish to avoid mistakes have in fact only to use -ee always,” he concludes.

As for contemporary English, R. W. Burchfield, writing in the 2004 revised third edition of the usage guide, says Fowler’s “advice is still sound.”

All the standard dictionaries we checked have either similar definitions for “guarantee” and “guaranty,” or don’t bother to include an entry for “guaranty.”

“As a look at any good dictionary will show,” Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says, “these two words are interchangeable in almost all of their uses.”

In fact, both the Associated Press and New York Times style books recommend that “guarantee” be used in all cases except in proper names (Guaranty Bank & Trust Co., for example).

Dictionaries define the noun this way: (1) something that assures an outcome; (2) a promise about the quality of a product; (3) a pledge that something will be done in a specified manner; (4) a promise to assume responsibility for another’s debts.

And here’s how the verb is defined: (1) to assume responsibility for another’s debts; (2) to assure the quality of a product; (3) to undertake to do something for another; (4) to make certain of something; (5) to furnish security; (6) to express with conviction.

Bryan A. Garner, one of the sticklers we mentioned above, disagrees with us. In Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed.), he recommends using “guaranty” for a promise to pay money if someone else fails to do so.

Garner has history on his side, if not modern usage.

The first of these words to enter English is the noun “guaranty,” which showed up in the late 1500s as a promise to answer for someone else’s debts, according to published references in the Oxford English Dictionary.

The noun “guarantee” appeared in the mid-1600s, the verb “guaranty” in the mid-1700s, and the verb “guarantee” in the late 1700s.

The OED says English adopted “guaranty” from the Anglo-Norman guarantie. The “guarantee” version apparently began as a misuse, “perhaps taken as a semi-phonetic adoption of French garantie.”

In summary, “guaranty” has history on its side, especially used in the sense Garner prefers, but “guarantee” has passed the test of time.

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Q: I recently encountered the verb “essentialize” in an academic monograph: “the term Hinduism is often essentialized.” The meaning here eludes me. (I’ve read what Pat has to say in Woe Is I about “-ize” endings.)

A: The verb “essentialize” means to express something in its essential form—that is, to reduce it to its essentials.

So the author of that monograph is apparently saying that the term “Hinduism” is often reduced to its essentials. In other words, the word “Hinduism” is used to refer to the essence of the religion.

If that is indeed what the author intended, we think he should have said so, even if it meant using a few more words.

But academic writing has its own rules and they don’t include simplicity. Stewart once helped a friend, a French meteorologist, translate a paper into English for a scientific journal.

When Stewart had finished, the English was so readable that the journal wouldn’t publish the paper until it was rewritten in academic jargon. Live and learn!

You can find “essentialize” in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.), and other standard dictionaries.

It’s not all that popular outside academese and bureaucratese (only about 60,000 hits on Google), but “essentialize” has been around in one form or another since the 17th century.

When it entered English in the mid-1600s, it meant “to give essence or being” to someone or something. A noun that showed up at the same time, “essentializer,” referred to the “first fabricator, perfector, essentialiser of Beings or he that gives Essence to Beings.”

The sense of the word that’s apparently being used in the monograph you read (“to formulate in essential form, to express the essential form of”) didn’t show up until the early 20th century, according to the OED.

This 1922 example from the Times Literary Supplement refers to Dante: “A poet in whom the manifold passions and cultural movements of his time were essentialized and ennobled into the highest poetical utterance.”

Many English words have been formed by adding “-ize” to the end of nouns and adjectives. This is a legitimate practice, but it can get out of hand. Here’s an excerpt from Pat’s comments about it in her grammar and usage book Woe Is I:

“For centuries, we’ve been creating instant verbs in English simply by adding ize to nouns (demon → demonize, for instance) or to adjectives (brutal → brutalize). The ancient Greeks were the ones who gave us the idea. The ize ending (often ise in British spellings) has given us loads of useful words (agonize, burglarize, fantasize, mesmerize, pasteurize, pulverize). It’s just as legitimate to add ize to the end of a word as it is to add un or pre to the beginning.

“Yet there can be too much of a good thing, and that’s what has happened with ize. Verbs should be lively little devils, and just adding ize to a word doesn’t give it life. Fortunately, many recent horrors (credibilize, permanentize, respectabilize, uniformize) didn’t catch on. But some lifeless specimens have slipped into the language, among them colorize, prioritize, and finalize, and they’re probably going to be around for a while.”

Our advice: If you don’t like ’em, don’t use ’em. Maybe they’ll go away.

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Q: Hardly a week passes without something in the news about mortgage hanky-panky. After reading one of the stories, I looked up the word “mortgage” and learned that it comes from old words for “dead” and “pledge.” Is that because a borrower’s pledge of repayment survives his death?

A: “Mortgage” is now such a common term that most of us are unaware that it was once a compound with a literal meaning: dead pledge. the words “mort” and “gage” are rare or defunct English terms for “dead” and “pledge.”

Why was a secured loan regarded as a dead pledge? There are differing explanations, but none have to do with the death of the borrower, as you suggest.

The Chambers Dictionary of Etymology explains the meaning of “mortgage” this way: “so called because the debt becomes void or ‘dead’ when the pledge was redeemed.”

John Ayto’s Dictionary of Word Origins says, “The notion behind the word is supposedly that if the mortgagor fails to repay the loan, the property pledged as security is lost, or becomes ‘dead,’ to him or her.”

Which explanation is right? Both of them, it turns out, even though they look at the transaction from different points of view.

Thanks to the Oxford English Dictionary, we know what lawyers in the 1600s thought about the notion of a “mortgage.”

For an “explanation of the etymological meaning of the term current among 17th-cent. lawyers,” the OED directs the reader to a quotation from Sir Edward Coke’s The First Part of the Institutes of the Lawes of England:

“It seemeth that the cause why it is called mortgage is, for that it is doubtful whether the Feoffor will pay at the day limited such summe or not, & if he doth not pay, then the Land which is put in pledge vpon condition for the payment of the money, is taken from him for euer, and so dead to him vpon condition, &c. And if he doth pay the money, then the pledge is dead as to the Tenant, &c.”

The term was first used in the 1300s in a general rather than a legal sense, however. It originally meant an arrangement for acquiring a benefit at the expense of a risk or constraint.

In fact, the first recorded use is a rather romantic one. It’s from John Gower’s long poem Confessio Amantis, written sometime before 1398: “In mariage His trouthe plight lith in morgage, Which if he breke, it is falshode.” (In marriage, his troth plight lies in mortgage, which is falsehood to break.)

And here’s another example of the general use, from William Hazlitt’s Table Talk: Or, Original Essays on Men and Manners (1822): “They will purchase the hollow happiness of the next five minutes, by a mortgage on the independance and comfort of years.”

The legal term “mortgage,” in which a debtor borrows money in exchange for an interest in real or personal property, developed in the mid-15th century.

Now for a closer look at the parts of this venerable compound.

The old adjective “mort,” now very rare, was once used in English to mean “dead.” And the noun “mort” meant “death.” Both are derived from Latin and came into English from Anglo-Norman and Old French sometime in the 14th century, but have since died out.

A related word, the now defunct “morth,” is a much older term for “death.” It came into Old English through Germanic sources.

Both the Germanic and Latinate versions—“morth” and “mort”—ultimately come from the same prehistoric Indo-European base, which has been reconstructed as mer- (to die).

This word element (mer-) was also a part of the Old English morthor, now “murder.”

The second part of the compound, “gage,” was once a more common English word than it is today.

It came into the language in the 14th century from Old French (guage or gage), but the French got the word from Germanic sources, according to the OED.

The ancestor is a prehistoric Old Germanic word reconstructed as wadjo, which is also the source of our words “wage” and “wed” (originally a pledge).

The English term originally meant a pledge or challenge to do battle. The “gage” was usually a glove thrown to the ground.

In the 15th century, the OED says, “gage” came to mean “something of value deposited to ensure the performance of some action, and liable to forfeiture in case of non-performance; a pawn, pledge, security.”

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Q: I work for a two-woman company. The other day I opened an email that was largely directed at my boss. I could have handled it, but I forwarded it to her with the comment “I trust you will take care of this one?” She was offended, and when I tried to defend myself, she criticized my grasp of English. Please advise!

A: We suspect that it was the tone of your comment—rather than the grammar or usage—that rubbed your boss the wrong way.

Did she have reason to take offense? Well, one meaning of the verb “trust” is to assume something, and she may have felt you were assuming too much.

Also, the word “trust” is sometimes used sarcastically and a sensitive person might pick up on that, even if no sarcasm was intended.

In fact, the only example given in The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th ed.) for this sense of the verb rings of sarcasm: “I trust that you will be on time.”

And a touchy or insecure boss might have felt that your comment was the kind of thing an employer, not a hired hand, would make.

We wouldn’t have worded a note to the boss that way, especially not to a boss whose antennae are especially sensitive. Something like “Shall I take care of this, or will you?” would have been more graceful.

But enough said. You don’t need any more criticism.

Let’s turn instead to the Oxford English Dictionary for a look at the history of the verb “trust” and how such a trusting word took on a few negative senses.

When English adapted the verb from the Old Norse treysta in the early 1200s, it meant (and still does mean) to have faith or confidence in someone or something.

Over the years, it has added such positive senses as to depend on, believe, entrust, and so on. But it has also been used in negative ways.

Since the early 1800s, the OED says, it’s been “used sarcastically or ironically to express one’s assurance that a person will or will not do something.”

Here’s an example from Richard Bagot’s 1902 novel Donna Diana: “Trust a religious old maid for scenting out love!”

And according to the OED, the command “Trust!” has been used since the mid-19th century as “an instruction given to a dog, requiring it to wait for a reward, usu. in a begging position with a titbit placed on its nose.”

Though we’re both experienced dog handlers, we hadn’t heard of this usage. All the citations in the OED appear to be from British writers, and some use the command with people, not dogs.

Here’s a canine example from Julia Maitland’s 1854 novel Cat & Dog (the narrator is “a thoroughly well-bred dog”):

“To please Lily, I learned to sit patiently watching the most tempting buttered crust on the ground under my nose, when she said ‘Trust, Captain!’ never dreaming of touching it till she gave the word of command, ‘Now it is paid for’; when I ate it in a genteel and deliberate manner.”

You can’t offer your boss a tempting buttered crust, but a small bouquet might be a good idea.

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Q: I don’t know where I got this from, but for years I’ve been saying: “Healthy enough to do what I want, wealthy enough to pay for what I want, wise enough not to spend it all in one place.” Any idea where I got it?

A: You may have come up with it on your own. We haven’t been able to find any examples of other people using those exact words.

However, many people have come up with similar riffs on the old “healthy, wealthy, and wise” proverb.

For instance, an e-card we spotted online displays a bottle of champagne and says: “May you always be healthy enough to drink it, wealthy enough to afford it, and wise enough to sip it.”

And a woman on a Web dating service summed up Mr. Right this way: “I like a man to be healthy enough to keep up, wealthy enough to go dutch, and wise enough to know when the time is ripe to sweep me off my feet, or take me, passionately in a dark alley.”

We could go on, but you get the idea. It’s not hard to find a wealth of examples out there.

The original proverb was first recorded in John Clarke’s Paroemiologia Anglo-Latina, a 1639 book of English and Latin proverbs: “Earely to bed and earely to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

However, similar expressions date back to the late 1400s. If you’d like to read more, we wrote a posting a couple of years ago that discusses the history of the proverb as well as Ben Franklin’s take on it.

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